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::: Monday, June 30 ::: |
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::: Friday, June 27 ::: |
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::: Monday, June 23 ::: |
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::: Friday, June 20 ::: |
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Insane: Bill challenges ICANN, VeriSign
This is exactly the sort of thing ICANN was set up to protect against. It's becoming obvious that VeriSign will never step back and let free enterprise reign. I applaud the representatives who are sponsoring this bill and I sincerely hope that ICANN gets the come-uppance they deserve.
At this point, I hold little hope that ICANN can be rehabilitated at all. We simply need to excise it like the tumor it is and put the future of the web in much more capable (and culpable) hands.
1:34 PM CST :: tell me a story
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Reminder: X Factor - Inside Microsoft's Xbox
For those who are interested, Discovery is showing this Xbox documentary tonight at 7p and 10p CST. I find it encouraging that gaming is becoming less of a niche market as is evidenced by programs such as this in prime time. Another example would be the coverage of video gaming trends on CNN and other news channels.
11:45 AM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Thursday, June 19 ::: |
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Whoa: IMAX Indianapolis
The IMAX theater inside the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis is showing Matrix:Reloaded starting this Friday and continuing for a couple of weeks. I am sorely tempted to make the four hour drive to check it out. I've never seen an IMAX film before and you have to admit some of the fight scenes would be mind-bending in such a large format.
That sure is a long way to drive just to see a movie though.
2:21 PM CST :: tell me a story
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Uh huh:USB Forum creates USB 2.0 consumer confusion
Here's a novel concept... why not just print the throughput on the box? Why confuse everyone with the nuances of whether "full speed" is faster or slower than "high speed" or if the device in question is truly USB2 or merely adheres to the adjusted USB1.1 standard? The theoretical maximums in question are often the purest of fantasy anyway. No need to make things worse.
I'm just happy they decided that all USB would be backward compatible. We certainly don't need a repeat of the WiFi debacle.
2:02 PM CST :: tell me a story
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Hmm: Of the Playstation Portable
It stills seems strange to me that Sony and Nokia both claim to be targeting a different market than Nintendo owns with the GameBoy et al. Personally, I can't imagine needing more than one portable gaming system and, right now at least, the chances of any system having more games than the Nintendo offerings is slim to none.
1:53 PM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Wednesday, June 18 ::: |
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Ludicrous: US Senator would destroy MP3 traders' PCs
"I'm all for destroying their machines," Hatch said during a Committee hearing Tuesday. "If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize the seriousness of their actions."
I am completely dumbfounded. How anyone could be paid off well enough to prepose a regulation that is so clearly a violation of the tenets of our society is beyond me. I simply don't have the words to express my revulsion.
[update: original WashPost article]
1:40 PM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Tuesday, June 17 ::: |
Sheesh: Spam Wars
There are 24 million small businesses in the U.S. If just 1 percent got your e-mail address and sent you one message per year, you'd have 657 additional messages in your in-box every day.
A sobering thought indeed.
2:19 PM CST :: tell me a story
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Eh: Network cards and dodgy Win 2003 drivers
On the face of it, this vulnerability sounds pretty serious. Leaking FTP and POP passwords is, after all, a big deal. However, if you consider the exploit vector for such a leak it becomes fairly obvious that the problem is far from critical.
Assuming, for example, that I was able to bounce a packet off your machine and retrieve the "pad" data which could contain your password. How would I have any way of determining that some random string of bytes was in fact a password unless I already knew it? Taking it one step further, even if I did know it was a password, I'm not sure there would be any reliable means of determining which service that password was originally transmitted for. That said, it's generally a pretty good idea to stay on top of LAN driver patches anyway for performance and data corruption reasons.
1:58 PM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Monday, June 16 ::: |
Hmm: XM or Sirius?
There's some good information here. I, for example, didn't know that XM is affiliated with ClearChannel. That alone makes me lean toward Sirius. On the other hand, XM seems to have the best chance of survival.
9:54 AM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Friday, June 13 ::: |
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Hmm: .la - Los Angeles' own TLD
I'm not entirely sure I agree with a country selling its TLD like this. I guess it worked out ok for Tuvalu and the .tv TLD, but it seems short-sighted to assume that it won't be needed at some point in the future. Either way, it's a sweet deal for anyone who wants a trendy TLD.
3:58 PM CST :: tell me a story
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Yep: On MS, AV and Addictive Updates
This is the first argument regarding the Microsoft buy-out of GeCad which seems believable. If WindowsUpdate were automatic and (shudder) compulsory, Microsoft could put off announcing security holes until everyone was patched up. That way they could claim that they fixed the hole before it became a wide-spread problem.
Mark my words, there is nothing about this whole situation that will turn out to be good for Microsoft customers.
11:42 AM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Wednesday, June 11 ::: |
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Ahem: Microsoft to buy antivirus expertise
I think everyone is missing the point here. Microsoft buying GeCad to help promote "Trustworthy Computing" is akin to Firestone buying a company who manufactures tire patches to improve the safety rating of their tires. It seems counter-intuitive to me to assume security holes are impossible to eliminate. Anti-virus protection should be insurance, not a front-line defense.
It's also worth noting that GeCad developed a truly cross-platform scanning engine. Microsoft will be more than happy to bury that product forever.
2:25 PM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Tuesday, June 10 ::: |
Good luck: Microsoft aims higher with Web software
Microsoft has built their reputation upon eventually succeeding with products nobody wanted. This, however, I consider to be a fairly hard sell. Any web developer worth their salt would cringe mightily at the mere mention of FrontPage.
The biggest problem with any web design tool is that it's far too easy to fall into the trap of designing cookie cutter pages. If everyone uses FrontPage and all FrontPage sites look and feel a certain way, then what's the advantage in hiring professional designers? Like I said, a tough sell.
2:20 PM CST :: tell me a story
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Hmm: Record Industry Targets Teen Programmer
This is certainly a different tale than was told in the previous articles I've read about this case. I'm not sure what can be done, but it's becoming clear that the actions of the RIAA benefit no one and harm many. That, in my mind, is the very definition of a terrorist group.
1:51 PM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Monday, June 9 ::: |
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Interesting: Lost Indiana
This is a pretty cool project. I've often felt the urge to document these sort of places as I discovered them. Such sites may not be unique to Indiana, but it seems like we have more than our fair share of them. We just seem to get tired of things and leave them be.
4:38 PM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Friday, June 6 ::: |
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Nope: Sony Portable DVD Player
While I can certainly cede a few points to Sony for the cool factor of such a gadget, I find it hard to see how a $600 player can compete when you can get a whole laptop for $699 which would offer DVD playback at twice the screen size. Battery life could be a key issue, but unless you've got a lot of discretionary income $600 still seems a little high. I'd say somewhere between $200 and $250 is the sweet spot for this sort of an item.
[thanks to Gizmodo for the link]
3:04 PM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Thursday, June 5 ::: |
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Heh: Xbox 1.5 rumours gather speed
I suppose it's good that Microsoft is listening to their customers, but since this is "a purely cosmetic makeover" and no "changes will be made to the internals of the system" it falls a bit short of the goal in my mind. Even if it does sport a smaller footprint the box will likely have the same weight as the original Xbox which, if dropped from a height of greater than two feet, is capable of creating a black hole upon impact.
1:27 PM CST :: tell me a story
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::: Tuesday, June 3 ::: |
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::: Monday, June 2 ::: |
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Yep: Microsoft to drop standalone IE
Why should they bother since AOL is going to test and distribute it for them? Besides, now that they have achieved their goal and killed Netscape, there's no real need to continue pumping cash into the IE sinkhole.
What the article fails to mention is that this announcement kills IE for Mac as well. If AOL kills Mozilla, then Mac users will be left with Safari. Speaking of which, I guess we now know why Safari went with KHTML instead of Gecko. It must be nice to have friends in high places.
10:21 AM CST :: tell me a story
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dinoneil[at]newdream[dot]net
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